Both VIP and Priority Inbox highlight your most important e-mails—they offer separate views for your important messages and alert you when these messages arrive.

I've wrestled with e-mail prioritization and notifications for over ten years as a productivity trainer and now as founder of AwayFind. The following is a comparison of these two products.

Intelligence

As might be expected from Google, Priority Inbox relies heavily on algorithms. Here are Gmail's most visible reasons for considering an e-mail important:

Your interaction with messages in the conversation

You often read messages with this label

It was sent directly to you

The people in the conversation

The words in the message

You marked it as important

Important messages in Gmail will appear in a separate area in your Gmail Web Inbox, or a separate screen on the Gmail iPhone/Android app.

Gmail's default view for Priority Inbox.

Apple's VIP feature, on the other hand, relies exclusively on your selections. You can add any of your contacts to your VIP List. If Tim Cook were on your VIP List, then an e-mail from him would appear in your VIP folder.

Simplicity

VIP is easy to understand and put to use, especially if you use OS X Mail at your desk and iOS on the go:

You can manage your VIP List by clicking on the blue circle to the right of "VIP" (see screenshot above)

You can set anyone to a VIP right within their contact page:

Setting VIPs in iOS

Priority Inbox, which Google had internally called Magic Inbox, requires faith in Google's algorithmic wizardry to fully accept it. The concept of separating your important and unimportant messages makes sense, but using it requires a change in workflow and time to customize.

For instance, Priority Inbox will separate your inbox into three categories out of the box (as pictured in the earlier Gmail screenshot):

Important and unread

Starred

Everything else

This in itself is complicated: now you have to be careful about reading an important message without taking an action, and you'll need to use starring to indicate a follow-up is necessary. Not that this isn't a reasonable e-mail workflow, but it's a dramatic change for most people. (I recommend that users getting started with Priority Inbox at least change their settings so that read/unread status is no longer a factor.)

I like the direction Google is suggesting for people, but the defaults are not simple, and there's no place to manage important contacts or settings.

VIP is simpler, in that it's easy to grasp, transparent to manage, and there are no surprises.

Intelligence vs. Simplicity

Pop quiz: name your favorite band. OK, now name 10 of them. That's hard. But if I asked you to pick 10 from a list of the top 15 artists in your iTunes Library, that would be a lot easier.

People are generally terrible at coming up with or maintaining an "important people" list without guidance. Thinking up your VIP List isn't just difficult, it's also the whole point of the feature: if you don't set it up right, you won't trust it, and then it won't be useful. So while VIP wins here for simplicity, I hope Apple considers adding some e-mail intelligence to the initial setup.

Notifications

One of the key benefits of both VIP and Priority Inbox is the ability to receive notifications for just the important messages. Rather than your phone buzzing every time an e-mail arrives, you can set it to only alert you when an important message arrives.

If you use iOS, with VIP you can easily receive push notifications for your important messages. It allows you to set different sound/notification settings to differentiate between important and unimportant notifications. It even allows you to select how much of the message to display when the alert is received. If you use OS X Mountain Lion, you can receive notifications on your desktop as well.

If you use Android, Priority Inbox will let you receive push notifications for your important messages (or messages for any particular Gmail Label). However, there's not much customization available beyond that. If you use Chrome, there are extensions you can set up to receive alerts for important e-mails.

In the future, I assume that Gmail's iOS app will offer notifications for only important e-mails. For now, Priority Inbox notifications are easiest with Android, and VIP notifications require iOS.

At present, VIP is more flexible for managing notifications on iOS and OS X (no add-on required). Better yet, with VIP you have total control of which e-mails will trigger notifications, so you'd be less likely to receive unnecessary alerts (fewer false positives) and can be more confident that you'll receive an alert from an e-mail you're waiting on (fewer false negatives).

Flexibility

VIP is easier to comprehend, but Priority Inbox is broader in its abilities. For instance, it's possible to set VIP to highlight very important e-mails (perhaps just your boss or spouse), but it's likely that your Priority Inbox will represent a significant percentage (30-60 percent) of your e-mail.

To the extent that you have complete control over who is most important, VIP is more configurable. To the extent that Priority Inbox learns your preferences and behaviors over time, Priority Inbox is more powerful.

VIP can work with any e-mail server, whereas Priority Inbox only works with Gmail. Priority Inbox works across all desktop and mobile clients, but VIP only works with iOS and/or OS X. And there's nothing to stop you from combining the two, though it's easier to buy an iOS device than it is to switch away from your e-mail provider; i.e., if your office supports iOS devices but uses Microsoft Exchange rather than Gmail, you can use VIP but not Priority Inbox.

I think it's impossible to say that one is more flexible than the other, given that flexibility and power go hand-in-hand. Priority Inbox is an engineering feat that can work wonders for some people, and VIP is a more mainstream way to help consumers and businesses alike.

From a pure feature perspective, Priority Inbox offers more. But not everyone can access that feature set or would benefit from its viewpoint, whereas most people could use some sort of VIP escalation feature (from their boss, their spouse, etc).

The future of e-mail prioritization

VIP and Priority Inbox are fundamentally different approaches to e-mail organization and prioritization. If you're a Gmail user with an iPhone, there's nothing to stop you from using both side-by-side.

That said, most people will likely invest in just one solution for e-mail prioritization, particularly as these tools become more differentiated. I foresee Apple creating more tie-ins between iOS and OS X. And I'll bet that Gmail for the Web and mobile will look dramatically different in a year or two.

Today, I see a lot of value in both of their approaches, though I think there’s space for improvement. There is room to walk the middle road between intelligence and flexibility, though I can see why Apple and Google have focused on their respective strengths.

VIP is a huge step forward, as it will challenge Google and Microsoft to simplify their approach to email prioritization. I prefer VIP, because it gives predictable control to which messages rise above. But for those who don’t know which messages deserve their attention, Priority Inbox may be more compelling.

If I had to choose between the two, I would use VIP. In my many attempts to use Priority Inbox I’ve never grown comfortable with its workflow. If I didn’t have filters and multiple mailboxes that removed most junk from reaching my primary work inbox, then Priority Inbox might be more helpful for me.

Have you had a chance to try VIP yet? Which tool do you prefer when it comes to email organization?

Jared Goralnick is the Founder of AwayFind, an app that alerts you of time-sensitive e-mails. He co-organizes the Inbox Love conference and tweets at @technotheory.

It's important to note that the Important and Unread/Starred/Everything Else configuration is just the default. You can customize these categories how you see fit. Personally, I find the default configuration to be excellent. Unlike VIP, it's automatic and smart enough to differentiate between important (e.g. Order Confirmations) and routine emails (e.g. Weekly Specials) from the same sender.

You can easily configure Gmail to work like VIP. Just create a VIP label and filter messages from your favorite senders to have that label and "skip the inbox."

Google's 'important' tag is useful, but I don't rely on it. I just set up filters for different mail sources that I want tagged and not sent to spam and it works nicely. For mailing lists, divert them away by 'Archiving' them. Simple.

when you go to "Add VIP" you choose from a list of your contacts exactly like your favorite bands from itunes example. So I'm not sure how that would illustrate your point...

Not exactly. Many people have thousands of contacts, just like they would thousands of bands in iTunes. And thousands of alphabetically listed items (of either) is not easy to work with. Instead, if you wanted to pick your favorite bands, someone could analyze your iTunes to give you a starting point. Similarly, for VIP, Apple could analyze your email history and then provide you a ranked list.

As comparison, and this we decided to leave out of the article, in AwayFind we do just that--we list your TOP contacts based on email history so you just have to pick 5 from a list of 10 instead of X from a list of several thousand.

At my own company, that change made an enormous difference in customer adoption and product value.

It's important to note that the Important and Unread/Starred/Everything Else configuration is just the default.

Sadly for most people, the default is all that ever matters. I'm glad that it works really well for you.

dacjames wrote:

You can easily configure Gmail to work like VIP. Just create a VIP label and filter messages from your favorite senders to have that label and "skip the inbox."

That's a great tip. However, any tool that takes things OUT of the inbox won't work very well with other mail clients or mobile. You'd kind of want to do the opposite, taking everything else out of the inbox (like Sanebox does, and to some extent, like Priority Inbox does). Or maybe just applying a label to these messages via a filter, and then setting your mobile app to also monitor that folder.

I think it's a bit cumbersome to do it this way, but for people who want the best of both worlds, using custom filters is a great solution. Alternately, there's nothing to stop someone from using Mail VIP with Gmail.

I use both heavy labelling / filtering and Google's priority inbox (with the categories: important (read or unread), my wife, sent, and other). I have only one gripe with prio inbox: While it shows mails that are being filtered (i.e. labelled and archived in my case), any mails that I label and archive manually will disappear from the Important list.

I sort my mail the other way around. Instead of having VIPs or priority mail or whatever, I have rules to automatically mark as read any message I don't care much about. Notifications, mail sent to DLs etc. They are all still in my inbox, just marked as read so they don't trigger the new mail alerts. Anything left unread is mail I really want to read.

I don't understand, all advantages of VIP you mentioned can be recreated in Gmail with the use of labels, by assigning your 'vip' contact's email addresses to a rule which apply a label. While it may not be user friendly to create and update a VIP rule timeserver you want to add a new vip contact, it is nevertheless possible.

I don't understand, all advantages of VIP you mentioned can be recreated in Gmail with the use of labels, by assigning your 'vip' contact's email addresses to a rule which apply a label. While it may not be user friendly to create and update a VIP rule timeserver you want to add a new vip contact, it is nevertheless possible.

That's a very fair point! And for power users, probably most readers here, it's completely applicable.

Two quick thoughts:

* Most of my ranking was based on ease of applying a particular feature, because most people will never dig into filters or customizing. I wish it were the case, but I've seen it both in training situations and with my own product's users -- until we spoonfed people the list of important contacts, they never created any rules. We had some IFTTT type users in the beginning, but to cross into the slightly more mainstream we had to make better defaults and more 1-click options. And there's nothing more mainstream these days than iOS -- how Apple built VIP makes sense for them and their audience. Given that Gmail is now the largest webmail provider, I think they should be paying attention to that kind of approach.

* Notifications are a huge part of VIP, arguably the biggest part. Priority Inbox does a terrible job with that, and Gmail filters are very difficult to set for any kind of alerting. A big part of email workflow is organization, but as big a part is attention management, and that's where notifications tie in. I think VIP really captures this well.

"if you don't set it up right, you won't trust it, and then it won't be useful."

I would counter with the fact that this applies to Priority Inbox as well, with the additional note that the dynamic, "intelligent" nature of Priority Inbox can make it difficult to know if you've set it up right.

For example, I have Priority Inbox set up, and from what I can tell, I've got it set up correctly. Yet I regularly find that emails that should have been marked as "important" aren't, and emails that should *not* have been marked as important still end up marked as such. I go back over my Priority Inbox setup each time this happens, trying to identify what I've got misconfigured, and I've yet to find anything apparent.

So now, even through I have Priority Inbox set up, I don't trust it. I'll go through the "important" emails first, but I still feel that I have to go through the "non-important" ones just as frequently, just in case something important ended up in there.

On the other hand, I know exactly how VIP works, and it's consistent. I get an email from my wife, it goes into my VIP box, every time.

Then again, I suppose that the whole point of this article was not really to weigh Priority Inbox vs. VIP, but to remind people that AwayFind is still a thing, despite the fact that Priority Inbox and VIP pretty much make many of the basic features of AwayFind irrelevant. I mean, I was an AwayFind user, but I didn't find much value in anything beyond the basic features. And now I don't even need those.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but nearly every email I get in my GMail inbox is marked as important by Google. I'm not currently using Priority Inbox; I have it set to Classic. I'm not sure if that makes a difference somehow. If I hover over the arrow icon for importance, they all have different reasons why that particular email is marked as such, but I'd say I only get maybe 1 in 100 emails that aren't marked as important.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but nearly every email I get in my GMail inbox is marked as important by Google. I'm not currently using Priority Inbox; I have it set to Classic. I'm not sure if that makes a difference somehow. If I hover over the arrow icon for importance, they all have different reasons why that particular email is marked as such, but I'd say I only get maybe 1 in 100 emails that aren't marked as important.

I've noticed the same thing. Perhaps one has to train it by marking things not important, and it will get better over time?

"if you don't set it up right, you won't trust it, and then it won't be useful."

I would counter with the fact that this applies to Priority Inbox as well, with the additional note that the dynamic, "intelligent" nature of Priority Inbox can make it difficult to know if you've set it up right.

...

On the other hand, I know exactly how VIP works, and it's consistent. I get an email from my wife, it goes into my VIP box, every time.

We're in agreement here. I too prefer VIP because it's consistent.

What I was getting at about the lack of usefulness was a side point -- that people aren't very good at identifying their own important contacts, particularly if that list changes regularly. I think Apple should provide suggestions there if they to make VIP much more useful.

Andy S. wrote:

I was an AwayFind user, but I didn't find much value in anything beyond the basic features. And now I don't even need those.

I'm glad to hear that in the past AwayFind's been helpful to you.

On the one hand, it's painful to see some of our popular features replicated by bigger companies. But on the other hand, our real vision is to help people to really combat their inbox with the best tools, and this article was written to that end.

That said, for those who find Priority Inbox too unpredictable or VIP too limited, we offer something in the middle, and with lots of ways to customize it. And let's not also forget that these tools above only apply to Google's ecosystem and, for the most part, iOS's. I'm happy to work with customers who use Exchange, Outlook, Android, and even Windows as well.

Sorry to lose your business to VIP, but I just hope my users (and prospective users) know we're paying attention and tackling these advances head on.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but nearly every email I get in my GMail inbox is marked as important by Google. I'm not currently using Priority Inbox; I have it set to Classic. I'm not sure if that makes a difference somehow. If I hover over the arrow icon for importance, they all have different reasons why that particular email is marked as such, but I'd say I only get maybe 1 in 100 emails that aren't marked as important.

I've noticed the same thing. Perhaps one has to train it by marking things not important, and it will get better over time?

Moreover, I tend to get maybe 20 emails a day, but I read/delete these almost religiously. If I want to keep something for long-term reference, I star it. If it's short-term importance, I keep it in the inbox until I no longer need it, then delete it.

Granted, my inbox has 800 items in it right now (all read, however) but I don't have trouble deleting the unimportant stuff and saving the important stuff. I'm not sure what kind of email people are getting where they even need this type of prioritization at all. If I just got in the habit of using the "archive" feature of GMail for emails I don't need close at hand, but are also not worth starring, my inbox would be empty at the end of each day.

when you go to "Add VIP" you choose from a list of your contacts exactly like your favorite bands from itunes example. So I'm not sure how that would illustrate your point...

As comparison, and this we decided to leave out of the article, in AwayFind we do just that--we list your TOP contacts based on email history so you just have to pick 5 from a list of 10 instead of X from a list of several thousand.

At my own company, that change made an enormous difference in customer adoption and product value.

Ouch! As an engineer, I get hundreds of emails a day via outlook exchange and gmail.If I tried to use VIP to sort these .... Shudder ....For me it is importance by topic, thread and contact ( though contact is lower priority ).

Unless your doing customer service or some type of support, do you ever have even 2 dozen people whose email you really need to read?

Sure, you can get by without it, but I still find it really helpful. It does a pretty good job of giving you some of the benefits of setting up a bunch of filters without actually having to take the time to do so. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I could never be bothered to keep my filters up to date all the time, and now I don't have to.

One other thing that I've found really useful is that the Gmail app can be set to notify only about priority email, which means I can actually turn on notifications without being buzzed by every newsletter or mailing list. I don't know if you can do a similar thing with filters/labels though.

I don't quite understand why VIP is even noteworthy at all. We've been able to create mail sorting rules for as long as I can remember. Be it in Exchange, Gmail, or any other email solution....

How exactly is adding someone to a VIP list on my iPhone different than the rules I had already set up in Gmail to put emails that match certain criteria in certain folders ("labels" as Google calls them)?

For that matter, does anyone who seriously uses email on a regular basis and gets more than a handful of emails per day NOT know about rules?

I don't even think VIP and priority inbox are directly comparable. One is just email rules for morons with all the complex logic of a light switch, the other is an artificial intelligence sorting mechanism.

While I can't offer a comparison, I can sincerely state that the VIP email functionality in iOS is a interface design blunder.

I get tons of email in multiple accounts. In one account everything is critical and requires deliberate response and archiving. Other accounts are personal and yet all the email is still valuable, yet not sorted into different folders.

What Apple has done is create a special folder and allow you to sort some mail to it. This special case folder defies all other conventions for mail management. Yet it accomplishes nothing that couldn't be accomplished just as easily with a generalized system for mail storage management via rules and folders.

The whole concept is beyond ludicrous. What if there was a special folder in the finder called VIP files? Yeah, that would be equally stupid.

Sorry to lose your business to VIP, but I just hope my users (and prospective users) know we're paying attention and tackling these advances head on.

FWIW, I did find AwayFind very useful prior to the advent of VIP, and I know a number of people who still find it invaluable. They're much more dependent on their email and calendars though, so as cool as I found some features of AwayFind (notifying the user when they receive an email from someone they've got an appointment with that day, for example), I didn't really have a use for them, personally. AwayFind is a personal jet, and all I need is a bicycle.

VIP and Priority Inbox are probably sufficient for 90% of us, but that 10% that needs a service like AwayFind, they *really* need it.

"SNARF was built around the notion that social network information that is already available to the computer system can be usefully reflected to the user: a message from a manager might be seen differently than a message from a stranger, for example. SNARF applies this idea to email triage: handling the flow of messages when time is short and mail is long."

The good: It's been providing me a Gmail-like prioritized inbox for six or seven years now. The bad: It doesn't get a lot of updates and the user interface is a bit clumsy.

If I had to choose between the two, I would use VIP. In my many attempts to use Priority Inbox I’ve never grown comfortable with its workflow. If I didn’t have filters and multiple mailboxes that removed most junk from reaching my primary work inbox, then Priority Inbox might be more helpful for me.

You are assuming that adding Tim Cook on your priority list means that all emails from Tim Cook are priority. Now, that's assuming there isn't a mix of personal AND business. And this is an "added" step in a process especially if you have to deal with email from over 25,000 sources. Do you have the time to delineate a profile for each and every sender and prioritize them yourself? If you keep your important contacts to less than 20 senders and NEVER have to deal with anything else (because you keep your email very private and secure) than neither VIP nor Priority is going to do anything for you. The low volume of emails make either system useless.

If, however, you have general email accounts or "catch alls" like support@xxxxx.com, then Priority will trump VIP. And I suspect an auto-handling will be preferable in most other situations as well, outside of mediation or legal counsel or similar kind of professions where most of your incoming is predictable AND important.

I don't quite understand why VIP is even noteworthy at all. We've been able to create mail sorting rules for as long as I can remember. Be it in Exchange, Gmail, or any other email solution....

How exactly is adding someone to a VIP list on my iPhone different than the rules I had already set up in Gmail to put emails that match certain criteria in certain folders ("labels" as Google calls them)?

I can tell you why VIP is valuable to me in one word: notifications.

While I don't get email on the level of some people who practically live in their inbox, I do get a decent amount. I had push email and notifications on my iPhone turned on, and my day was marked by constant playing of the email notification sound. I eventually learned to ignore it, which -- in addition to being very annoying to my friends and coworkers -- basically made the notifications worthless. I wasn't responding to them, so why even have them? With VIP, I can set my email audio notifications to "none", but set the notification for VIPs to something audible. So emails can roll in all day long, but I'll only get an audible notification when one of my VIPs emails me.

While I can't offer a comparison, I can sincerely state that the VIP email functionality in iOS is a interface design blunder.

I get tons of email in multiple accounts. In one account everything is critical and requires deliberate response and archiving. Other accounts are personal and yet all the email is still valuable, yet not sorted into different folders.

What Apple has done is create a special folder and allow you to sort some mail to it. This special case folder defies all other conventions for mail management. Yet it accomplishes nothing that couldn't be accomplished just as easily with a generalized system for mail storage management via rules and folders.

The whole concept is beyond ludicrous. What if there was a special folder in the finder called VIP files? Yeah, that would be equally stupid.

You seem to be seriously misunderstanding how VIP works. It doesn't create a folder that email is sorted into, it creates a smart folder that allows you view emails stored across many other folders. It's roughly equivalent to flagging emails then filtering your combined accounts to show all flagged emails only. Instead of flagging individual messages though, VIP effectively flags senders.

I've just verified this by going into Apple Mail on my iMac, looking at my VIPS and displaying the mailbox each email is in. As expected, the emails are still stored in their original mailboxes.

Incidentally, smart folders like this have existed in the Finder for quite a while and they're very useful. I could easily set up a VIP folder showing all documents created by particular authors if I wanted to and their would be nothing ludicrous about it.

Were you just confused about how VIP works, or do you have a principled objection to the concept of filtering and smart views?

Unless your doing customer service or some type of support, do you ever have even 2 dozen people whose email you really need to read?

Read those, and set up couple filters like "Meeting" "urgent" etc.

I'm with you. I don't get very many emails every day that are worth reading. A lot of the time, most work emails are simply marked read and archived. Same with personal email, though I'm much more inclined to just delete unnecessary personal emails. Actionable items are either dealt with/ replied to immediately (and then archived) or they are put into a follow up folder to be dealt with when I have more time. I set up VIP's briefly for my wife and my parents but I get so few emails (from them and in general) that it just adds another layer of complexity.

I don't quite understand why VIP is even noteworthy at all. We've been able to create mail sorting rules for as long as I can remember. Be it in Exchange, Gmail, or any other email solution....

How exactly is adding someone to a VIP list on my iPhone different than the rules I had already set up in Gmail to put emails that match certain criteria in certain folders ("labels" as Google calls them)?

For that matter, does anyone who seriously uses email on a regular basis and gets more than a handful of emails per day NOT know about rules?

I don't even think VIP and priority inbox are directly comparable. One is just email rules for morons with all the complex logic of a light switch, the other is an artificial intelligence sorting mechanism.

To me the novelty in VIP is that I can have a Notification pop up with a preview of the message. So most of my mail is just showing on the badge, but anything from my wife or my daughter's daycare center puts up a notification on my lock screen (or at the top if I'm actively using my phone), with a preview so I can get an idea on how important it is. It's not just a sort to a folder, it's actually giving a higher priority notification. Plus, I believe VIPs also tie into the DnD support (so that calls still come through even on a silenced phone-I haven't looked into this yet). Again, it goes a bit deeper than a simple rule.